


walking towards the sea

by apolliades



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Never Let Me Go AU, Slow Burn, you don't need to have seen/read NLMG to get this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 00:31:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13693119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolliades/pseuds/apolliades
Summary: Like all the students of Hailsham school, Harry S. grows up knowing his whole life has already been planned for him. When he turns eighteen, he will leave the school, and shortly he will begin to donate his vital organs in order to cure sick people. Some time around his third or fourth donation - before he is old, or even middle-aged - his short life will be complete.He will do this without question, or complaint; without so much as a second thought. This is just who he is. This is how his world works. And Harry has no reason to fault it. It gave him Louis.





	walking towards the sea

**Author's Note:**

> soundtrack [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/1132253686/playlist/3CzrKCwzJPIgeKHxo23Ucd?si=4Hra9oE_QKGYz4gn4GbMaA).

_preface_

Like all the students of Hailsham school, Harry S. grows up knowing his whole life has already been planned for him. He will never be an actor, or a doctor, or a school-teacher. He will never travel far. He will never work in a supermarket. His purpose is more important than that; his purpose is special. When he turns eighteen, he will leave the school, and shortly he will begin to donate his vital organs in order to cure sick people. Some time around his third or fourth donation - before he is old, or even middle-aged - his short life will be complete. 

He will do this without question, or complaint; without so much as a second thought. This is just who he is. This is how his world works. And Harry has no reason to fault it. It gave him Louis.  

 

* * *

 

_i: hailsham_

 

“I’ll have a cup of tea and a sandwich, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve run out of sandwiches.” 

“I’ll have a slice of cake, then, please.” 

“I’m sorry, sir—” 

Off-stage, Harry hears Miss Gertrude sigh, softly. He suppresses a giggle; doesn’t want to break character.

“—but we’ve run out of cake, too.” 

“You’ve run out of cake, too?” Louis parrots back at him, making his eyes go wide with theatrical astonishment. “What sort of a cafe is this?” 

Harry’s always loved the role-playing scenarios, more than any other class. Even more than art. Especially when he’s paired up with Louis, and they get to spend ages lovingly and laboriously pulling the mickey out of every single scenario the guardian has them run through, to prepare them for the Outside. 

“Boys, please,” Miss Gertrude interrupts, before Harry even manages to formulate his retort. Shame — it would’ve been a good one, he’s sure. “The other children also need to have their turns. Harry, let Louis give his order.” 

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes only because Miss Gertrude would be able to see, Harry gives Louis his brightest grin, and sets an empty plate on the tray in front of him, and pours imaginary tea from an empty pot into an empty teacup.  

“Here you are, sir. One cup of tea and one sandwich.” 

Perfectly seriously, Louis says: “But you just told me you’d run out of sandwiches.” 

“It’s alright,” Harry says, sagely. He’s smiling so hard his face hurts. “This is a special one, just for you.”  

Miss Gertrude makes a quiet sound of exasperation, which he ignores. Finally, Louis smiles back. He takes the empty cup and plate from Harry’s tray.  

“Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome,” Harry beams. “Anything for you, Lou.” 

- 

“What if they send us to different places?” 

It’s late, way past bedtime, but this particular fear has Harry wide awake, leaning across the gap between their beds to nudge Louis hard with his toes when he takes too long to answer his fervent whisper. 

“They won’t.”

Louis answers without even opening his eyes. Harry _wants_ to find his drowsy unconcern reassuring, but he can’t help worrying that it’s not that Louis is _right_ as much as he just hasn’t thought about it as much as Harry has.  

“But they _might,”_ Harry hisses. Louis grumbles, ignores him, and it makes Harry want to scream. He leans right over the edge of his bed and yanks Louis’ blanket off him. Louis opens his eyes and scowls. 

“Harry.”

He fixes him with this stare, this stare which, even in the almost dark, sends shivers down Harry’s spine. He reaches out and takes his blanket back, arranges it back around his shoulders, with this stare fixed on Harry the whole time. Then he reaches out again, just reaches out, and a second passes with his hand hovering there in the space between them before the penny drops and Harry reaches out too, and takes it. The moment he does, Louis’ fingers squeeze his own with all the passion his voice belied. 

“They won’t,” he says. And now that he says it like this, with his pulse under Harry’s thumb, with his eyes so bright in the moon-through-the-curtains glow, Harry believes him. 

-

“Aren’t you getting anything?” 

Louis’ shoulder bumps up against Harry’s in the jostling throng of the hall. Harry leans into it on purpose, afraid that if he doesn’t keep close Louis might get swept away again, pulled back into the ceaseless current of students around them. He’s always found the Sales a little overwhelming. Exciting too, obviously, and he looks forward to them as much as anyone else, but overwhelming all the same. He wishes he could hold on to Louis’ hand, use him as an anchor. 

A boy rushes past and almost topples them over and they grab at each other to stay upright. The guardian behind the stall calls after the boy to slow down and comport himself with some decency, and Harry’s fingers curl tight into Louis’ sleeve. 

“Harry.” 

“Oh, sorry. No.” Harry remembers himself, looks back at Louis and laughs. “No. Don’t think so.”

“No?” 

Louis tilts his head at him, curious. Harry looks down at his modest fistful of tokens. One red, one yellow, one green. 

“Haven’t really got enough tokens left for anything good.” 

The best things in the Sales, in Harry’s opinion, are books and clothes, and the best out of those are expensive. Usually he saves up - the month before last he spent all of his tokens on a glorious blue shirt, embroidered with dark vines around the cuffs and the collars. It’s silk, and too big for him, and he even heard a guardian mention that it must have got mixed up in the Sale things by accident, because what use would anyone at Hailsham have for something like that.

Harry still thinks it’s the most marvellous thing he owns, and keeps it careful and neat in his box, hoping he’ll have a reason to wear it eventually.

“What? How come? What’d you spend them on?”

He feels his face heat a little despite himself. Louis is so close to him, has to be to be heard over the hubbub of the hall. Harry lets go of his sleeve. 

“Last Exchange,” he says. Says it quietly enough that Louis has to lean even closer to hear it, his brows pinching together.

At the last Exchange Harry’d bankrupted himself of tokens buying Louis’ pictures — the kind of rubbish ones that no one else had wanted. He looks up at Louis sidelong and watches realisation dawn on his face.  

“Oh, Harry,” he says, “you idiot. Here, then.” Louis takes Harry’s wrist and tries to force a portion of his own tokens into his palm; two red, one white, three blue. “Have some of mine. Seeing how they’re really yours anyway.”  

Harry makes a fist to keep Louis out and shakes his head. “Nah. Really, it’s fine. I haven’t seen anything I want much anyway — really. Louis.” 

He pulls his hand out of Louis’ grip and shoves his own three tokens into Louis’ hand instead. Louis blinks at him, unresisting. 

“Get something good, yeah?” Harry smiles at him, lets him go, and leaves the hall.

- 

Louis finds him after, sitting on his own on a bench in the corridor. He gives him a funny look as he sits beside him, so Harry sticks his tongue out back and they both laugh, and it’s alright again.

“I got you something,” Louis says after a moment. When Harry looks at him he looks away, fumbling in the pocket of his blazer. He draws out a closed fist, and hesitates. 

Harry nudges at him. “Well? What is it?” 

A moment passes wherein Louis doesn’t move, just frowns down at his fist. 

Harry nudges him again, holds his own hand out flat, excitement tinged with confusion. “Lou?”

“It might be a bit silly. A bit — I dunno, girly. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to, alright? I just thought—” Louis shrugs. “Thought you might like it.” 

Harry’s almost ready to seize Louis’ fist and pry his fingers open to find out what it is. He restrains himself only out of the fear that Louis might change his mind and take it away again if Harry pushes him too hard.

Something light and silver shimmers from Louis’ fist into Harry’s palm. It’s a chain — a bracelet, made of fine links and a delicate clasp. Two charms dangle from it, each no bigger than a fingernail: an anchor, and a little swooping bird. And there’s a slightly bent loop, too, where it looks like once there might’ve been a third, now broken off. It’s plastic, cheap, but it looks enough like silver to fool a boy who’ll never know better. A boy who couldn’t care less anyway.

It takes a minute before Harry can tear his gaze away and look back at Louis. Louis is watching him, and he looks so concerned, so shy in a way that makes Harry want to grab him and cling to him.

“I mean— like I said, you don’t have to wear it—”

Harry shoves his wrist under Louis’ face, sleeve pulled back. 

“Fasten it for me, Lou.” 

In an instant that shyness falls away, and Louis looks so pleased with himself, that he got it right. He beams. Harry beams back.

-

By the time he’s fourteen Harry’s mostly given up on sports. He doesn’t _totally_ see the appeal — he’s been taught it, but it must never have quite stuck — of spending an hour chasing after a ball and shouting at each other. Not when he could spend it lounging under the trees with the girls and watch Louis play, instead. Louis has always been good at sports, a far sight better than Harry. He’s shorter and a little skinnier but he’s good, got some knack for it, got a good throw on him and hardly ever misses a catch. 

Harry sits in the old oak shade and watches him, and listens to the high easy voices of the girls. He’s a bit popular with them, the reason for this being, he thinks, that one of them taught him how to do a French braid a couple of years ago and he got so good at it that they all want him to do theirs, now. When he explains this to Louis one night Louis laughs right in his face. It startles him; he’s not really used to being laughed at. Not by his best friend.

“What— why are you laughing, Lou? What else would it be?”  

Louis laughs again, not so unkindly this time, and flicks Harry on the cheek. It stings, but with the way Louis is looking at him all of a sudden Harry barely feels it. He’s looking at him like he knows something Harry doesn’t. Like Harry’s just a bit stupid. But it’s not a mean look, or patronising, it’s — fond. Slightly sad. It’s impossible to look away from. 

“It’s ’cos they all fancy you, you idiot.”  

Now it’s Harry laughing, face scrunching up; “Don’t be stupid.”  

“It is! ’cos you’re — y’know. Handsome.”  

There’s a thought that never even crossed his mind. Harry starts to laugh again but it dies on its way out of his mouth. Because Louis touches his face again, but gently this time. His fingers hesitate for a split second before the backs of his knuckles graze his skin; his thumb slides softly over Harry’s cheekbone. Harry doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t even blink. They’ve seen this in films, he realises, seen men touch women like this the moment before— before—  

But then Louis’ hand is gone again, and Harry’s held breath leaves him too, and Louis turns away to climb into bed. Facing away. Harry wonders in a moment of panic if he did something wrong. Should he have said it back? Told Louis he thinks he’s handsome, too? Touched his face? Leaned in, and— 

“’Night, Harry,” Louis’ voice comes muffled by his covers. It takes a moment for Harry to find his own. 

“Goodnight, Lou.”   

-

Under the old oak it’s cool and pleasant, and Harry takes refuge there from the too-hot English summer sun. On his own, this time, a little way off from the girls. Last time he’d sat with them Carrie had planted a slightly damp little kiss on his cheek after he finished tying up her hair, and while it hadn’t felt _bad_ , exactly, it had felt a bit strange, had made him think of what Louis had said the other night, that the girls were friends with him because they fancied him. He supposes he should’ve been pleased — and maybe he is. But he can’t really tell for _sure,_ and he doesn’t think he wants to risk a repeat until he’s sure. And he certainly doesn’t want to risk Carrie trying to kiss him anywhere else. 

So he sits alone, knees tucked in, and watches Louis dart from base to base with more focused intensity than Harry thinks a game of rounders entirely deserves.  

When Louis looks over Harry waves at him, grinning. Louis waves back a touch distractedly, his gaze flicking straight back to the bowler, who’s a tall lad, bigger than the others and older, too, almost eighteen.  

The bowler looks over at Harry. The way he looks at him isn’t pleasant. Harry watches as his mouth curls into a sneer. 

“Saying hi to your girlfriend, Louis?”  

It takes Harry a second to realise the boy means him. 

“Shove off,” Louis says. He’s at last base, hands on his knees, catching his breath from his last run. He glances between Harry and the bowler with a kind of nervousness that makes Harry nervous too just to see it. 

“Sweet of him to come out and watch, isn’t it. Is that why he never joins in? Better view from down there, is it?” 

Something tightens in Harry’s chest. He’s been teased before, plenty of times, but there’s something different about this. He can’t seem to find the breath to just laugh it off.  

“Hey, Harry S., answer me. It’s rude to ignore someone when they’re speaking to you. Are you listening to me, Harry? I said, _why don’t you join in?”_

Pain blossoms across the side of his face quite suddenly. Somewhere behind his head there’s a thud, dulled by the ringing in his ear, and there’s Louis’ voice, sharp and furious. 

“Leave him alone! You leave him alone!”  

Harry turns, a little dazed, and pats at the ground behind him until he finds the rounders ball. It’s cool and smooth, hard and heavy in his hands; must just have grazed him, or it would’ve knocked him out, surely. He runs his thumb over the stitching. 

“You could’ve killed him!” 

Or killed him. There’s a funny thought. 

When Harry looks up again it’s to find Louis in front of him, red-faced and breathing hard. Sweat plasters his hair to his forehead, and his eyes are wild. 

“Here,” Harry says, holding out the ball. Louis’ face contorts into something miserable. He doesn’t take it. He reaches for Harry instead, like he’s going to touch him, but doesn’t quite. 

“Are you alright?” 

“Yeah.” It’s kind of a lie, though. His cheek is burning and now his eyes are, too. Louis touches his shoulder and Harry feels his breath catch in his chest like he’s about to cry.

“Harry—”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Harry makes himself smile. It makes his face hurt worse. He presses the rounders ball into Louis’ hand. “Here, go on. You were winning, weren’t you?”  

- 

“The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told.”

Harry doesn’t quite understand the things Miss Lucy says to her class that day. And he doesn’t understand why those things make his heart beat as fast as it does, make his stomach flip, his chest tighten. No one else seems to understand, either.

“You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I'm not.”

No one says anything about it, at least, or at least not within his earshot. Which, he imagines, means it can’t really be all that important. If it were that important, someone else would say something. Miss Emily would say something, if it really mattered. But it still frightens him; gives him this strange, back-of-his-mind worry he can’t put his finger on. He looks to the next desk to Louis, wanting reassurance, wanting the soft calm of Louis’ eyes on his to settle him. But Louis is looking at Miss Lucy, fixed on her, and he doesn’t look away, no matter how hard Harry wills him to. 

“If you're to lead decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.”

The thing is, Harry doesn’t really know what “having a decent life” even means. Miss Lucy talks of going to America, becoming actors, teachers, racing-car drivers. None of that means anything to him, not really. They’re stories and daydreams, that’s all. Even becoming an adult is a far-off, foreign concept. No real meaning to it. And the thing is - the only thing Harry thinks of when he thinks of a decent life is a life with Louis in it. 

At assembly the next morning, when Miss Emily announces that Miss Lucy is no longer with them, it feels like something cold runs down Harry’s back. He grabs for Louis’ hand and holds on tight, tight, tight. 

- 

“D’you ever think about it?”  

They sit next to each other in art, like they do in everything. Louis is making a careful study of the still life arrangement in the middle of the room; Harry has been distractedly decorating his canvas with daubs of blue and green for the past twenty minutes. Abstract, he’d call it, if anyone asked, but truthfully it’s just that his heart isn’t in it and his mind’s elsewhere altogether. He’s never been excellent at art, anyway, for all that he enjoys it. Music is different — music he’s good at, his teachers say so. But when Madame comes it’s to look at their art, not listen to their singing, so he tries, at least.  

“Lou.” 

Louis doesn’t look up from his drawing. He isn’t very good at it either, which is why Harry has so many of his pictures. He seems to take it so seriously, though, that Harry would never say so. 

“Hm?”  

“Do you ever think about it? What Miss Lucy said?” 

There’s a pause, before Louis slowly shakes his head. Even more slowly, he says, “No.” Dragging out the vowel. “What would I do that for?” 

Harry supposes he has a point. Louis is concentrating so hard his tongue is sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Harry briefly considers poking it to see what he’d do, but decides it wouldn’t be worth it. He fiddles with his paintbrush instead, until he accidentally launches it across the room. Louis looks up then, and frowns at him.

“Why?” he asks, studying Harry’s face closely, in a way that makes him shift in his seat. “Do you?”

It’s hard to look at Louis when he’s staring at him like that. Harry looks across the room instead, squints, trying to see if he can spot where his paintbrush landed. Not on anyone else’s work, he hopes. That would be criminal. 

“Harry.” 

_“What?”_

“Do you?” 

Louis is still looking at him like that. So intensely. Where on Earth did he learn to be so intense?

“No. ’course not.” Harry raises his eyebrows, and smiles. “What would I do that for?” 

- 

Now he’s sixteen Harry spends his time with a group of boys, instead of the girls, because that’s what Louis does and he’s too old now, really, to hang around with just girls. He’s not sure why - just knows that he is. They’re Louis’ friends, more than his own, but he doesn’t care much.

They talk about all kinds of nonsense. Girls, and sex, mostly. Who’s having it with whom, though Harry struggles to believe any of them are actually having it at all. He just can’t picture it, even though he’s seen the diagrams and sat through the lectures about it same as everyone else. From a technical standpoint he understands how it’s done. He _thinks_ he even understands the desire to do it. It’s just when he tries to reconcile that with himself — fitting _himself_ into that picture is difficult enough as it is, let alone a girl. 

Sundays in the spring pass slowly, with not much else to do but talk about these things. The gang of them are wandering back from a game of football, doing just that, for what feels like the hundredth time. The sluggish déjà-vu of it has Harry zoning out until a hand lands on his shoulder. 

“Harry could get her though, I bet.” 

“Oh, come on. I’ve seen them together — _I_ bet he already has.” 

Another hand thumps him on the arm. Harry doesn’t even know who they’re talking about. 

“Tell us then, Harry. What’s she like?”  

Then, suddenly, it’s Louis asking. There’s an edge to his voice and a hardness to his eyes that Harry doesn’t like. “Yeah. Go on, Harry. Tell us.” 

He doesn’t know what to say, though, and the very question just seems ridiculous, so he laughs. He laughs, and he sees something change in Louis’ face.  

Before he can open his mouth to explain, the rain hits. It comes on suddenly, thick and heavy, falling in sheets. The boys yell and leap and bolt for the nearest sports pavilion - except Louis. Louis is running in the opposite direction, back towards the main building. Harry stops still, staring after him. Already he’s half blind and deaf from the rain. He calls out, anyway. Something has him rooted to the spot. 

“Louis! Louis, what are you doing! You’ll get soaked!” 

But Louis doesn’t stop running. Harry stands there, and gets soaked, and watches the rain swallow him up. 

- 

All that night, Harry can’t sleep for thinking about it. Some time in the small hours, when the sunlight’s just starting to show through the curtains, he wakes Louis. Reaches across the gap between them for his hand where it rests on his pillow, by his head, fingers half-curled and soft. 

“Lou.”

Louis’ eyes fly open. He looks at Harry for a moment, then slowly but firmly pulls his hand away. Tucks it under the covers, out of Harry’s reach. 

It stuns him. He freezes still. Louis has never drawn back from him like that before. Harry feels it as keenly as a blow. 

“We’re a bit old for that now, don’t you think?” Louis says, and turns his back.

-

A week later Louis makes the announcement to their table at lunch: he’s in a relationship. That’s how he says it — “I’m in a relationship.” He holds his chin high and looks proud as he says it, but the words sound stilted and wrong out of his mouth, like a child reciting lines written for an adult, without fully understanding what they mean.

Harry puts his fork down slowly so he doesn’t drop it. He watches Louis look around the table, checking everyone’s reactions, except his. Maybe because Harry’s right next to him, and he’d have to twist his neck to see? He doesn’t know. He doubts it.

Louis says he’s in a relationship with a girl named Ella from their year. Harry only knows her as much as he knows anyone else at Hailsham; her name, a vague image of her face. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her and Louis together. He doesn’t think he’s ever even heard Louis mention her before, and wonders if he’s making it up, to show off in front of the other lads. Some of them have girlfriends - maybe he’s jealous. 

But then, he realises, with a jolt that makes him feel like the bread he just ate is trying to force its way back up his throat - maybe Louis just doesn’t tell him everything anymore. If he doesn’t, when did he stop? _Why_ did he stop? 

After Geography, he sees them holding hands in the corridor. So he’s not just making it up, then.

-

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?”  

One night Harry waits until Louis gets up to go down to the the bathroom and follows him, catches him by the back of his dressing gown. Whispers to him harsh and urgent.  

Louis spins on the spot and meets Harry’s eye with a ferocity that makes him take a step away. 

“Why didn’t you tell me about Carrie?” he spits back, and rips himself free of Harry’s hands. He storms off down the dark corridor without waiting for an answer. 

Something icy settles in the pit of Harry’s stomach. The twisting anxious discomfort of being accused of doing something wrong, but not being told exactly what.

The next time Carrie goes to kiss him on the cheek Harry turns his face so her lips land on his instead. He’d been expecting to feel something, inside, but he doesn’t. Just the wet press of her mouth and a vague, dull awareness that this has something to do with revenge.

She’s his girlfriend now, he supposes. He wonders why he isn’t more pleased.

Louis doesn’t look at him for five days straight.

-

They stay friends, of course, but it’s not really the same after that. There’s this distance between them now that makes Harry’s heart ache when he makes the mistake of letting himself think about it. He tries to put it down to growing up, to pairing off into boyfriend-girlfriend couples. Tries to tell himself it’s normal, natural. Inevitable. Thinking of that way helps, a little, to soothe the ache.

Doesn’t help him to understand why he feels the way he does when Louis kisses Ella in front of him, though, or why he can’t bear to listen when Louis talks about sex, even though it doesn’t bother him when anyone else does. 

He has sex too, eventually, with Carrie. Because she wants to, and he supposes he wants to as well, if for no other reason than to find out what all the fuss is about. At first, when she climbs into his lap in the quiet of an empty classroom with a chair under the door, Harry feels so little that he wonders for a moment if there’s something wrong with him. If he’s broken somehow. Nothing’s ever been said in any of his check-ups but what if they don’t test for this sort of thing? Carrie mouths at him, rubs against him with childish eagerness, and Harry stares at the ceiling and does his best to touch her the way he thinks he’s supposed to. 

It starts to feel alright, after a while. Physically, at least. So physically, at least, he isn’t broken; his body responds and functions the way he’s been told it’s supposed to. Why not his head, then? Harry closes his eyes, in case that might help. 

He closes his eyes, and the first thing he sees behind them is Louis’ face. 

It scares him so much it must show, because Carrie stops moving and looks at him, alarmed. “Harry? What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?”

He shakes his head viciously, as if he can shake off the image of Louis. 

“No, no.” He grabs at Carrie, hands fumbling over her skinny thighs and narrow hips. Something about touching her feels wrong, alien. A bolt of repulsion twists his stomach. He doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know what to do. She’s beginning to look frightened, so he touches her hair instead, combs his fingers through it the way he used to smooth out knots before making plaits, and that’s easier. 

“Kiss me,” he tells her. There’s a tremor in his voice that makes her bite her lip. Her smile is nervous and faltering; Harry feels bad for it, so he makes sure his own looks warm. “Come here,” he says, and tucks a curl behind her ear. “’S alright. Kiss me.” 

By the time they’re eighteen he’s pretty sure he’s only still with her out of habit, and a vague, insidious sort of apathy which inhabits the back of his mind and reminds him there’s no point any time he so much as wonders about doing anything different. 

-

The night before they’re due to leave, Harry runs into Louis in the corridor, in the dark, well after bedtime. Louis is hurrying, head bowed, dressing gown clutched tight around him. He’s a few paces past Harry before Harry even manages to say anything. 

“Louis?” 

It’s so quiet in the corridor, his voice echoes off the walls. The sound of it seems to trap Louis, halts him where he stands, mid-stride, his back to Harry still. 

Harry wants to go to him, but he doesn’t. Daren’t. When he speaks next he lowers his voice, carefully, so that this time there won’t be such a ricochet. 

Tentatively: “Are you alright?”

The question hangs there between them for what feels like hours. Neither one of them moving, neither one of them making a sound. The only thing Harry can hear is his own heart, hammering against his ribs. Blood pulsing in his skull. It’s the sound of pleading without words. It’s the sound of wanting Louis to look at him more than he’s ever wanted anything else in his life.

And then he does. Louis turns just enough to look at him over his shoulder, and he smiles. His eyes are red, Harry can tell even in the half-dark, can see the moonlight through the window shining off the tears there. But he smiles.

“Yes,” he says, gently, like he’s speaking by a sickbed. “Yes, Harry, I’m alright.” 

There isn’t a single part of Harry that believes him, but he can’t bring himself to argue. For a second he stares, and then he nods, uncertainly. 

“Goodnight, then, Harry.”  

“Goodnight, Lou.” 

And he turns away, and disappears into the dark at the end of the corridor, footsteps fading as he does. Harry shivers; he feels cold all over, like he’s just encountered a ghost. By the time he’s been to the bathroom and back, Louis is sound asleep in the bed next to his, mouth a little open. Nothing about him looks amiss. 

By the morning, Harry’s almost convinced himself he dreamt the whole thing.

 

* * *

 

_ii: the cottages_

 

Louis turns out to be wrong: they do go to different places. And it’s hard, at first, for Harry to forgive him for it, despite everything. For nearly two decades Louis has been his whole life almost as much as Hailsham has, even towards the end.  

He deals with it, though. He’s been raised for it. The only thing that really came as a shock, after all, was leaving Louis. He’s had a lifetime to prepare for everything else. And a lifetime to prepare for leaving Louis too, really, and those last two years of drifting apart like they did, especially, should’ve made it easier. But he just always thought, somehow, that even if they weren’t close like they used to be— he’d just always thought that Louis would always be there. 

At night it’s worst. Especially at the start. It’s worst because Louis _had_ always been there at night, even when they grew apart. Even when he stopped letting Harry hold his hand. He’d still been there, in the next bed over. Harry could still look at him, find peace in watching him sleep. Getting used to sleeping in a room on his own is so strange, but it’s not the room full of other sleeping bodies that he feels the loss of. Just the one. 

When he comes down on his first morning, after his first sleepless night, a couple of the veteran girls are already up in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. The slightly older of the two smiles at him, and gives him a friendly pat on the arm as he passes. _Do I look that bad,_ he wonders, and smiles back.  

But he likes living at the Cottages, anyway. The Cottages are a handful of old farm buildings, and he likes the cold air, the fields for miles, the dirt tracks. He likes the damp-earth-and-woodsmoke smell that lingers everywhere, clings to everything, himself included. He likes the fearless chickens who come scuttling towards him across the yard when he steps outside in the morning and peck at his wellington boots; he likes the boots, too, deep green under a perpetual layer of mud. He even likes the mud. There’s something comforting about it. Something undefinably pleasant in hours spent up to his elbows in dirt, something cathartic about scrubbing it off afterwards. Familiarity, maybe. Nostalgia for the time spent working the vegetable garden at Hailsham, maybe, but Harry doesn’t wonder about it too much. He’s never wondered about anything too much. There’s never been any point.  

Harry’s the only one there from Hailsham and he realises from the moment he says hello that he’s not quite the same as the others. That there’s something off about him, something he lacks which they all have. Something undefinably different. But he doesn’t wonder about it too much.  

He does wonder about Louis. About where he ended up. But that’s normal, he thinks. Because the others at the Cottages wonder about their old peers, too, old schoolmates, old friends. They’re nice, the others. Harry likes them - or likes most of them, at least, and the ones he doesn’t like or who don’t like him are easy enough to avoid. Seven of them live in the Cottages, among three buildings; Harry’s first new friend is a fair haired boy with an accent that makes him laugh simply because he’s never heard it in person before, and he finds it so stupidly charming. 

Harry’s never really learned how to miss people. By wondering about him, he misses Louis without knowing that’s what it is.  

He wonders about Carrie too, sometimes. But he doesn’t feel that same sting when he thinks of her. 

-

“It’s bullshit, though, total fuckin’ bullshit.” 

No one ever swore at Hailsham, especially not the way Niall does, using profanities as punctuation regardless of whether he’s angry or pleased. The newness of it combined with his accent is nothing short of fascinating to listen to. Harry lingers in the porch for a minute, balancing carefully on one foot then the other to pull his boots off as quietly as he can manage. 

Niall’s got an argument going with the girl from their Cottage, Harry gleans, eavesdropping from the doorway, just because he likes to listen, doesn’t want to interrupt.  

“It isn’t! Why wouldn’t it be true? What other reason could there possibly be—” 

“To make folk on the outside feel better, is why, and that’s all there is to it. Fuckin’ bullshit, I’m telling you right now.” 

“And _I’m_ telling _you—”_  

Harry’s curiosity gets the better of him. He lets himself in quietly, but the doors in the Cottage creak even worse than the floorboards and both pairs of eyes are on him as soon as he enters the room. The girl, Laura, lights up so suddenly when she sees him that she almost stands up out of her chair. Harry puts his jacket over the back of the chair by the stove to dry and raises his eyebrows at her. 

“Ask him!” She says, addressing Niall while gesticulating violently in Harry’s direction. Harry stays still where he is, unwilling to risk having an eye gouged out by her bony pointing fingers by getting closer. “He’s from Hailsham, ask him! He’ll know, he has to! He’ll tell you!”  

Niall laughs and shakes his head at her, spreads his hands on the table, tilts his chair back onto its hind legs. “He’ll tell you it’s all bullshit, too, ’s what he’ll tell you.” 

Harry leans against the chair back and kneads the fabric of his jacket under his hands, grounds himself in the cold damp of it, and asks, “What’s the fuss?” 

The pair at the table both try to answer at once; Laura’s voice, high and strained, pell-mells in with Niall’s low rumble until Harry can’t make sense of either of them. Niall’s looking wearily at Laura; Laura is looking at Harry with disturbing desperation. Nobody’s ever looked at him like that before, not even close to it. He raises his hands in a plea for peace, tries to laugh it off in a way that won’t make him sound as unsettled as he feels.

“Hey, hey — how can I tell either of you anything if you haven’t actually asked me a question?”  

Niall rolls his eyes. “She thinks—” 

“Tell him it’s true, Harry, please,” Laura interrupts - she’s actually leaning over the table towards him, now, looking up at him with such terrifying avidity that he wants to turn away. “About how — how you can get more time — if you’re in love, you know? Properly in love, and you can prove it, they give you more time to be together, before you have to donate. We’d heard about it, rumours, so we’ve been waiting, you see, for someone from Hailsham to come along, someone who’d know how to apply. Go on, Harry, tell him.” 

He’s not sure how, exactly, but Harry knows that when she says _tell him,_ she means _tell me._

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, gripping his jacket a little harder. “Never heard of it.”

She looks at him like she’s about to cry. Keeps looking at him, as if looking at him will change his answer.  

“Really,” he says. It makes him feel guilty, how she’s looking at him. He almost wants to lie just to make her stop. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.” 

Niall makes a noise, breathes out in a huff through his nose. “Told you—” 

Laura stands up sharply and leaves in a rush. As she passes she kicks the leg of his chair, hard, and Niall and Harry both jolt as it clatters against the stone floor. The noise of it rings in Harry’s head long after he leaves the room. 

- 

Her bedroom is next to his, so Harry lies awake that night because he can hear her crying. A little past midnight he goes and sits down on the floor by her bed. 

“It doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he says, quietly.

She peeks out at him from under her duvet. Her eyes are red raw and despairing. “What?”

“What you said. About getting more time if you’re in love. Just because I don’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s not true.” 

She stares at him. In a sudden rush he reaches out and grasps her hand. She looks startled, and Harry does too, for that matter. He’s not really sure where that came from, except that he was thinking of Louis, of how much better he’d always felt, just to hold his hand. 

“If I find out, I’ll tell you, alright?” 

Holding hers feels different. Her skin is hot and damp and her hand feels smaller than he remembers Louis’ being. Her fingers don’t fit into his the way Louis’ did. He realises he can’t remember what it was like to hold hands with Carrie well enough to make a comparison. 

Harry holds on anyway. Laura stares. Eventually, she nods. 

“Thank you.”

The way she looks at him then is almost worse than how she was looking at him before. Harry lets go of her hand just as she starts to grip back.

“Harry, wait—!” 

He hesitates in the doorway. Puts his hand on the jamb and runs his thumb against the grain just to feel it. The wood stands up, threatening to splinter. “Yeah?” 

“Have you ever been in love?” 

The question knocks him off kilter. His heart stutters as his mouth does. 

He thinks of Carrie, because if he’s ever been in love, it must have been with her, surely. He thinks of her sweet face, her neat hands, her eagerness. Of putting his fingers through her hair. But for the life of him he can’t begin to picture the way she looked at him. 

Louis, though. Harry can remember Louis’ eyes as clearly as if he were right in front of him. Their intensity; their exact shade of blue, rich in the dark, pale when the sunlight shone through, like glass. The fan of his lashes. His slow blink when he was tired. 

Harry suppresses a shudder. A sliver of the door jamb breaks away and pierces his thumb and he grits his teeth a little but doesn’t flinch. Laura’s still looking at him, waiting for her answer, so he shakes his head no. But he goes to back to bed feeling like he’s told a lie.

He lies awake the rest of the night, too, even with nothing but silence from the other side of the wall. 

- 

Going out in the mornings to collect the eggs and scatter feed for the chickens quickly becomes Harry’s favourite thing to do. Something about their frantic dash towards him, clucking and cooing and ruffling their feathers, is just endlessly pleasing no matter how many times he does it. After a couple of weeks some of them even start letting him pet them, sort of.

He wastes half a morning sitting out by the coop, making clucking noises of his own and trying unsuccessfully to coax them to sit on his knee with little pieces of grain. 

It’s nice, living like this, he thinks. Almost feels like a shame that it can’t be forever. “Forever”, though, is such an unimaginable concept. For all Harry knows of _forever,_ this might as well be it. 

The wind starts to pick up, and he supposes he’s getting hungry. Forever like this, he thinks. Forever with the chickens by his feet and the wind tugging at his hair and the beginnings of a low ache in his belly. When he turns he spots Laura in the next field over, small enough that he can only _just_ tell that it’s her. She has a boy beside her, one of the other veterans whose name he can’t remember but who he’s fairly certain is the reason she wept so much about the deferrals thing. They’re together a lot, always out on these long long walks. Now and then Harry wonders, if Louis had been sent here with him, whether they’d go for long walks too. 

He lifts a hand and waves. Across the field Laura and her boy stop walking to wave back, and for a second Harry wonders… if he just stays like that, waving at the two little figures in the distance and never stops, if he wouldn’t be able to turn that moment into forever. But Laura stops waving before he has the chance to try. 

It’s almost as chilly in the back porch as it is outside, when Harry stops there to take off his boots and hang up his coat. He turns on the tap at the old cracked sink, rolls up his sleeves to wash the dust and dirt off his hands and stops.  

Something looks wrong straight away, but it takes a good minute of staring at his wrist before Harry realises what it is: his bracelet is missing. Its absence is startling. Since the day Louis fastened it around his wrist, he’s never taken it off; he’s so used to seeing it there that without it his whole arm looks wrong. For the way the sight of it punches him in the stomach he might as well have looked down and discovered he was missing a hand. 

Panic creeps in slowly and takes him by surprise. Losing a bit of old jewellery is no reason to panic, but he feels it nonetheless. He turns and runs back out into the yard in his socks, remembers himself suddenly when he feels the cold wet ground and runs back inside, shoves his feet into his boots, runs back out again. It’s already hard to breathe and the cold makes it worse; his chest constricts in complaint, throat tightens. It feels like an overreaction, but all he can think is that he can’t _lose_ it. It’s all of Louis he has left. 

When Laura finds him ten minutes later he’s sitting on an upturned bucket with his face in his hands, trying to remember how to breathe. The hand she lays on his shoulder makes him shudder, like he’s waking up.  

“Hey, Harry.” There’s a careful frown on her kind, wind-bitten face. “Everything alright?” 

“Yeah,” he says, scrubbing at his eyes and doing his best to show her a smile. He must look like a lunatic, he thinks. She must think he’s cracked. “Yeah, fine, just— I was just, uh, looking for something. Lost something.” 

“This?” Laura asks, and in her woollen-gloved hand she holds up his bracelet.  

The relief hits so hard he almost feels like he’s going to cry again, and beats the feeling back; he laughs instead. Laura laughs too, though mostly out of surprise, as Harry surges upwards and hugs her. 

“Thank you,” he says, almost gasps it, and lets her go so she can fasten the bracelet around his wrist again. “Thank you. I mean I know it’s— it’s a stupid little thing—” 

But Laura’s face is understanding when she looks at him. Understanding and a little sad. 

“Was it from someone special?” she asks, sounding as though she already knows the answer. 

Harry looks down at his wrist, at his bracelet which is more than a touch worse for wear, by now. Its silver finish has long since started to tarnish, the corners of the anchor’s points and the bird’s wings have worn down a little from how often he’s followed their lines with his thumb, and now there’s mud caked in between some of the chain links, too, and he can see where part of the clasp has chipped, which must have been how it came undone and fell from his wrist in the first place.  

He looks at it and thinks of the smile on Louis’ face when he realised Harry liked it.  

“Yeah.” 

Laura smiles. “A girlfriend?” 

“Oh — no, no. Nothing like that.” Harry shakes his head. “Just a friend,” he says, and he’s telling the truth, but yet again he can’t help but feel like he isn’t, not entirely. Louis was never a _just._ “My best friend,” he tries again. It still doesn’t feel quite right.

- 

“We’re going on a trip!”

Laura accosts Harry in the kitchen when he comes down one morning, makes a beeline for him from the sink and seizes him by both hands. Still bleary and uncomprehending with sleep, Harry blinks at her. It’s cold in the kitchen — the Cottages don’t have central heating, and the stone walls seem to soak up any warmth and keep it for themselves — but her hands are hot on his. He shivers.  

“What?” 

Releasing one of his hands, Laura dives hers into her coat pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. She flutters it in front of Harry’s face, proud. 

“My licence arrived. I can drive! Come with me into town, Harry, you’ll love it. We’ll get ice cream.”  

It’s part of the training to be a carer, learning to drive, to be able to go from hospital to recovery centre to hospital to home again as and when. Harry feels a flicker of envy, just for a second, for no real reason. He’ll get his too, after all, at some point. All he has to do is apply. And he will, eventually. Soon enough. It’s only how much he loves the Cottages that’s keeping him, but they all leave, eventually. 

“Yeah, alright.” He nods; excitement is dawning on him slowly, waking him up a bit. He hasn’t been into town before. Only heard about it, about the shops and the cafés and the beach with a pier.  

“Good,” Laura beams, and finally lets go of him completely. “Go and get dressed. I’ll wake up Niall.” She darts for the stairs, calling over her shoulder. “Don’t be long!”

He comes back downstairs five minutes later in the blue silk shirt he bought in that Sale all those years ago and never had a reason to wear till now, with its delicate embroidery, which finally fits him now and is creased, just so, from being folded in his case for so long. Laura and Niall make wide eyes at him in the kitchen as he shrugs his jacket on over it. 

“What?” he asks, with a laugh that betrays his uncertainty. 

“You going somewhere special?” Niall asks back, and Harry can tell from his tone that he’s teasing him, even if he can’t tell exactly why. 

Laura shoots Niall a look and says, “Don’t.” And then to Harry, she says, “I think you look lovely.” 

Harry still doesn’t get it, but he smiles anyway.

-

The town is incredible. Grey and cold and beautiful, and even though he knows from Geography lessons at Hailsham that it isn’t particularly big as towns go, it feels huge. Overwhelming and exciting both at once, like the Sales used to be, only _so much_ bigger than the Sales. Laura parks her car at the roadside overlooking the beach, and it takes Harry nearly a full minute to even undo his seatbelt because he can’t stop staring out of the window at the water. When Niall pulls open his door for him it makes him start. 

“Come on.” Laura leans down and grins at him, takes hold of his jacket and tugs gently. “Come and look at it for real.” 

They buy ice creams with sticks of flaky chocolate that crumbles and dissolves under Harry’s teeth. It’s exquisite, even though it’s so cold it makes his mouth ache. They stand on the white-painted pier, lean on the railing and look out across the sea together. It’s choppy and pale, and like the sky, closer to grey than blue in colour, but still too beautiful to look away from. 

“I want to go swimming,” Harry says, breaking the mesmeric quiet that had settled over them. 

Niall’s laugh is soft and surprised, not unkind. “You don’t know how to swim.” 

Harry looks at him for a moment, then back to the water. Shrugs. “I think it’d come to me. Once I got in.” 

He plants his hands flat and firm on the edge of the rail and leans over, as far as he can manage, till he’s on his toes, till his feet are not-quite-almost about to leave the pier below, till all he can see is the water with its white spray and endless, endless grey. Immediately there’s a sharp intake of breath on either side of him, and two different hands clasping the back of his jacket. 

“Careful, mate,” Niall tells him, as the soles of Harry’s feet land flat onto the wood again. Laura’s looking at him with this strange kind of concern, brows drawn close together and the corners of her mouth just slightly turned down. 

“Shall we get some lunch?” she says in a way that doesn’t really leave room for an answer, and steps away from the rail, and that’s it, the moment’s passed, without stopping to say hello. 

-

Harry feels oddly out of place in the café, where they sit in a triangle around a chequer-topped table and he stares at the thumb-worn menu, overwhelmed again. The names of the dishes in their faded type may as well be in a foreign language; he has only the vaguest idea of what _Coca-Cola_ is and, though he remembers learning about money clearly enough, the numbers printed there are virtually meaningless to him. After a few minutes a large lady in a grease-stained apron approaches with a notepad, and looks at him in bemusement when, to his embarrassment, all he can manage is to stutter at her. 

 _This is nothing like the role-playing scenarios,_ he thinks, feeling discomfited and faintly guilty, and lets the others order for him. 

Cola turns out to be pretty good, even though the bubbles burn when they get up his nose. 

Afterwards they roam the town for a bit, meandering aimlessly in and out of shops, just looking at things, mostly. Laura buys a pale yellow blouse in a second hand shop. Niall spots a music shop over the road, and all but drags them across to it in a burst of enthusiasm. 

-

A little bell chimes over their heads as they go through the door. Inside the shop it’s slightly dim, owing to the displays of instruments and related sundries crowding the windows, blocking out the sun. The reddish light, overpacked shelves, the sheer amount of _things_ hanging not only from the walls but from the ceiling too, and the tinny music filtering in from some unknown source all combined have the place walking the thin, precarious line between cosy and claustrophobic. Underneath the predominant smell of paper and dust there’s a faint scent of something else, woody and warm, that Harry can’t place. 

Niall disappears somewhere into the midst of it all, and Laura wanders off to flick through the shelves upon shelves of vinyls and cassettes. Harry, at first, just stands in the doorway and stares, until someone tries to get through the door behind him and he’s almost knocked over. He recovers his faculties enough to apologise before half stumbling over to a rack of guitars. 

His fingertips brush the nearest set of strings experimentally, and the sound they make is more thrilling than he could’ve expected. It feels like an age since the music lessons at Hailsham, and he wouldn’t dare pick up the instrument to attempt to play something properly even if he could remember, but it feels good just to hear the sound and know that he’s the cause of it. He runs his fingers gently back the other way, grins. And then almost knocks the guitar onto the floor when a voice by his shoulder makes him jump. 

For the first moment after he turns Harry thinks he must have gone back in time. Or forwards, maybe, somehow, because the man he finds himself staring at is so terribly familiar, only Harry’s never seen him this old. 

It’s Louis. He’s looking at Louis. He could almost swear it, the resemblance is so close, except for the age; this man must be in his mid thirties. Louis, like Harry, would only be at the tail end of eighteen. 

“Can I help you? Looking for anything in particular?” And his voice is wrong, too. Similar, but not quite right. The accent is different, rougher. Harry exhales unsteadily. 

 “No,” he manages, relieved that he sounds fairly steady despite his racing heart. “No, thank you. Just— just looking.”  

The man-who-isn’t-Louis smiles at him and nods, polite and perfectly detached. “Just give us a shout if you need any help,” he says, and leaves Harry alone, with his racing heart, to stand there with his fingers overing over the strings of the guitar, having to act as if he doesn’t feel like he’s just been punched in the stomach. 

Not that Harry ever has been punched in the stomach. But he imagines it would feel something like this. He’s never seen a ghost, either, but he imagines…

Niall and Laura find him still standing there several minutes later, Niall with a record-shaped paper bag tucked under his arm, both of them looking endearingly exhilarated. 

“Thinking of splashing out?” Niall asks, nudging Harry’s side and gesturing to the price tag on the guitar in front of which he’s still standing. Harry’s gaze, though, is elsewhere, following not-Louis as he rings up a customer behind the counter. 

“I think, uh…” Harry tries, then has to stop and swallow, blink, give himself a shake. “I think that guy, uh.” He nods in the direction of the counter. “I think he might be the Original of someone I know. Knew.” 

The mirror-image expressions of awe on Niall and Laura’s faces would’ve made him laugh, if he weren’t still reeling from the idea himself. 

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah? I mean, maybe?” Now he’s saying it out loud, though, uncertainty’s beginning to creep in. Harry squints in the man’s direction, trying to get a better look at him across the poorly lit room. The man glances over, frowns slightly when he notices the three of them, all staring at him now, three sets of wide eyes and slightly open mouths. “Looks like him. Kind of. I mean, it’s hard to tell. He’s a bit older.” 

Laura hums thoughtfully. “He’d have to be, though.” 

They stand there half a minute longer before Harry can’t do it anymore. Outside he stands there on the pavement with his hands over his face, head tipped back, eyes closed. Laura touches his arm briefly, he supposes just to let him know she’s there.

“Kind of weird, isn’t it? We thought we saw mine once, a while ago, but.” She shrugs. “Like you said. Hard to tell.”  

Niall stands a few feet away, still gazing idly at the music shop’s window display.

“What would we even do, though?” he says after a moment, without turning round. In the reflection, though, Harry can see him frown. “If we found them. Our Originals. It’s not like we could talk to them or anything.”  

“We’d… get to see what we’ll look like when we’re older,” Laura supposes. Her voice lacks commitment; she frowns, too. 

“We aren’t going to _get_ that much older,” Harry points out. And it’s just a fact, something he’s always known at least on some distant level. But saying it out loud like that, just now — for some reason, it feels like a revelation. Judging by the looks on the others’ faces, it feels that way for them, too. 

The journey back to the Cottages is a quiet one. Harry thinks of Louis the whole way.

If he never sees Louis again, he thinks, and if that man in the music shop really was his original — at least this way, he thinks, he got to see a glimpse of what he could have been. It’s not the same. But it’s something. And it’s a lot more, he supposes, than most of them will ever get.

 

* * *

_  
iii: kingswood_

 

By the time he has a licence of his own Harry is twenty-one and half way through training to become a carer. Laura and Niall have both moved out, moved on; Niall two years ago, Laura almost three. Harry misses them in a quiet, unnameable way, and occasionally wonders if they miss him too. Others move in and take their places, fill their rooms, and Harry realises slowly that he’s technically a veteran now. He half-recognises a few faces as Hailsham students from the years below.

Being a veteran is something he never quite gets the hang of, though. He feels bad when he can’t answer all of the questions the younger ones put to him, and he feels bad that most of the answers he does have aren’t really even his own, but rather simply passed down from Laura or Niall or someone else, or overheard from the television. And he feels strange as hell when _he’s_ the one sitting in the little café in town placing all the orders for the row of shy, anxious faces peering over the top of menus opposite him.  

In the years before he too leaves the Cottages, Harry goes back to the music shop a handful of times. He builds up a small collection of cassettes, and for about a week he even considers buying a guitar, but the main reason he goes is to catch glimpses of the man who _might_ be Louis’ Original. Every time he sees him he changes his mind, goes between _he is, he isn’t, he must be, he can’t be,_ until his head’s spinning with it. After a while he stops going altogether, and tells himself it doesn’t matter. 

He moves out, finishes his training, moves in to a flat of his own, right in town. The days-weeks-months, then a year, pass in a blur; things just happen to him, around him, and Harry watches them happen and feels, a lot of the time, like he’s dreaming. At the back of his mind dwells the vague sense that he shouldn’t be allowing his life to drift by, like this, when he only has so much of it left. But it’s no more than a fleeting notion. Harry lets it pass like everything else.  

Living alone is strange, though, the strangest thing in the world — strange enough to wake him up a bit. He sleeps badly at first and plays music constantly until the old lady from the flat next door comes round and complains.  

He buys a Walkman. 

After one week in the flat he gets the notice that he’s been assigned his first donor. 

He drives to Kingswood Recovery Centre with his heart in his throat and his knuckles white on the wheel.

-

As it turns out, though, there was no real need for him to have been so nervous. The donor he’s to be looking after is a sweet girl with round eyes and a soft voice; she’s only just given her first donation, so she’s just as new as he is. When he sits down beside her and she looks at him like she’s so pleased to see him, even though they’ve never met, he doesn’t have to think about what to do. It just comes to him. 

They eat chocolate biscuits together and play Scrabble, which he’s terrible at but she’s pretty good, and Harry’s heart swells when he makes her laugh without even really trying. 

“I couldn’t quite hack it, as a carer,” she confesses, on their fifth day together. She’s recovered enough for them to take a wander around the centre grounds, so they walk slowly, arm in arm, breath clouding in the cold air. “Gave up after my second. Bit pathetic, really, isn’t it?” 

She smiles up at Harry, earnest and sad. He shakes his head no, of course not.

“I just couldn’t bear it,” she continues, looking away from him again, “Watching them…” She trails off into quiet, and looks back at him, lays a thin hand on his arm and squeezes. “You’re doing brilliantly, though. I reckon you’re a natural.” 

Her voice is a little breathless now, and Harry notices the flush on her face from more than just the cold, the strain around her eyes. “Shall we stop for a bit?” he suggests, nodding to a bench nearby. “D’you need a rest?” 

Fervently she shakes her head, and grips him tighter. “No, no. I mustn’t stop. I’m afraid if I stop I mightn’t be able to start again.” 

-

A month later Harry sits up and reads to her the whole night before her second donation, when she’s too scared to sleep. It’s _Pride and Prejudice,_ which is her favourite; now and then he catches her mouthing the words along with him. 

In the morning he holds her hand as she’s prepped for the operation, and she never takes her eyes from him, not once. “Thank you, Harry,” she tells him, voice faint as the anaesthesia begins to take hold. As her eyes close, she murmurs, “Be brave.” 

She completes before she ever wakes up again. Harry drives home in a daze. He parks outside his building but can’t make himself go in, so he starts up the car again and drives to the pier instead, walks across the pebble beach to the sea and just stands there, shuddering in the cold as the water soaks through his shoes, his socks, his jeans. It’s so cold the air burns in his lungs, but he stays there until he’s numb, and the urge to cry has passed.  

He drives home again, certain he won’t be able to sleep, but exhaustion takes him as soon as his head hits the pillow.

- 

Eventually it starts to get easier, once he learns better how to disconnect. How to make his donors smile and relax when he’s with them, but to block out their faces when he goes home for the night. He tries not to carry them with him, to forget the sounds of their laughs, their favourite books, the way their faces pinch or twist or pale when they’re in pain. He gets better at it, slowly. His survival rate starts looking up — his second donor completes on his second, but his third and fourth both make it to three, which is considered good. 

He doesn’t sleep much, but that’s not really a bad thing, since he needs to be able to get up and drive to the recovery centre, or to this or that hospital at all kinds of hours of the day and night. 

Days begin to blur together again, but that’s not really a bad thing, either. Switching over to auto-pilot and watching himself go through the motions of living without really having to think is easier than the alternative. 

His fifth donor manages four. 

His sixth completes on her first. 

Harry sits in the plastic chair outside the operating theatre and watches the nurses wheel out an empty gurney. He thinks he should feel something more than the half-hearted flicker of regret that he does but really, he’s just so tired. 

-

He’s twenty-five and he’s thinking, maybe it’s time to give it up. Some people manage to stick it as carers for years, till twenty-seven or twenty-eight, till almost thirty. There’d been a time a while ago when Harry thought that might’ve been him, but he can’t begin to imagine it, now. The toll of the past four years is so heavy on him, like a weight around his neck, bowing his shoulders. He’s been living on auto-pilot for so long, now, he can only half-remember what it’s like to be anything else. 

His donors still do well, on the whole, but he forgets their names now without trying. He falls asleep in waiting rooms and on trains and in front of the TV and in front of his breakfast, and once, just for a second, at the wheel of his car, before the sharp blast of someone else’s horn jolts him awake.

When even that doesn’t scare him like it should, he knows — that’s it. It’s over, limit reached. He’ll be no good to anyone anymore, now, and he can’t see any point in waiting around for a month or two just to be told so when he’s already realised it for himself. So he shakes himself awake and drives the rest of the way to Kingswood, to turn in his resignation as a carer, and apply to start his donations. 

Twenty-five is a decent age, he thinks, with a vague sense of detachment. The motorway passes by in a grey blur. Longer than a lot of people last. 

-

If there’s one thing he regrets though, he thinks, as he navigates the maze of Kingswood’s endless linoleum corridors, familiar enough to him now that he can find his way anywhere with his eyes closed — if he were to allow himself to regret one thing, if there were any point at all in doing so. Leaving Louis the way he did would have to be it. 

It’s stupid really, because it’s not as if Harry even left him, technically. They were sent to different places and that’s all there is to it. He just wishes that in that last night, in the corridor, in the last moment they had alone together—  

Wishes what, though? Harry reaches the right reception desk and finds it empty. No wonder; it’s late. He settles into one of the plastic chairs that line the far wall and lets his head fall back. 

Wishes he’d said something, done something to keep Louis there a little longer. Wishes he’d pressed harder, not just taken _I’m alright_ as an answer and let Louis turn away from him, wishes he’d gone to him and taken his hands like he’d so badly wanted to and made him stay, if only for a moment. 

But then, what difference would it have made? His last memory of Louis would be a little different. So what?

It comes and goes in waves, the realisation that nothing he ever does as a person will ever have any meaning, ever make any difference, even though he’s had his whole life to get used to it. Whether or not the distant knowledge that his donations will save lives feels like a comfort depends on the day. Often it does, but some days he can’t quite reconcile with the thought that he’ll never even know any of these people. That he just has to accept, in good faith, that whoever these people are, something about them means that they’ll make better use of his kidneys or liver or lungs, of his life, than he would.

He hears footsteps in the hall and straightens up, rubs a hand over his face. It’s not like he’s angry about it, or even bitter, really. He’s far too tired to be either of those things, even if either of them had ever felt like an option. Mostly, there’s just this kind of ache, when he has the energy to feel it.

“You okay there?”  

There’s a nurse behind the reception desk now; Harry vaguely recognises her, but can’t quite conjure up a name. One hand hovers by the computer while she waits for him to answer. 

“Yeah.” Harry hauls himself up out of the chair and tries to roll some of the stiffness out of his shoulders. “Yeah, fine, I was just—” 

“Waiting for someone?” The nurse tries, when after a moment Harry’s sentence is still hanging half-finished. 

Harry doesn’t hear her. He’s looking at the computer screen, roused by the nurse tapping the keyboard, where the last opened file is visible now, angled just enough that Harry can see it. He’s looking at Louis. Just a picture of him on the screen, a nondescript ID photo where he looks kind of bored, gazing somewhere just past the camera. It must’ve been taken several years ago, because Louis looks exactly the same as he does when Harry last saw him. Exactly how he remembers him, seven years ago. Seven whole years. Harry’s mouth goes dry.  

The nurse is still looking at him, the expectancy in her expression slowly giving way to impatience. She looks between him and the screen, back to him again. 

“Someone you know?” she asks. “Harry?” It’s jarring to realise that she knows his name. He blinks, tears his eyes away from the screen and forces himself to look at her. She smiles just a fraction. “Friend of yours?”

“Uh—” Speaking is a struggle. Harry swallows, blinking rapidly, shakes his head. “Yeah, no, I mean— we were at Hailsham together.” 

His gaze goes back to Louis’ file, and he only just dares to scan the rest of the page. Most of it’s medical jargon indecipherable to him, but he gathers that Louis is here, now, at Kingswood, to recover from his first donation. Here, and he’s alive. Harry feels quite suddenly like his legs might give out under him. He puts a hand on the edge of the reception desk in an attempt at steadying himself without making it too obvious. 

The nurse is nodding, her face a mask of only slightly contrived understanding — or maybe she’s going for sympathy, Harry can’t quite tell. 

“I could assign you to him, if you like,” she offers. Her voice is casual, in a way that feels bizarrely out of place to someone whose whole world has just been turned upside down. “His current carer has put in a request to leave, and you…” She pauses with her lips pursed to tap at the keyboard, and in an instant Louis’ picture is gone, and Harry is looking at an image of himself, instead. “…don’t seem to have anyone at the moment.”  

Again she looks at him, brows slightly raised, waiting. Harry marvels at the apparent fact that the tumult inside of him isn’t visible to her. 

“Yes,” he says. It comes out only just above a whisper. “Yes, please.” 

“Alright.” She smiles a polite, customer-service smile and her fingers flutter across the keyboard again.

Harry stares at her. He can’t quite believe that that’s it. That can’t be all it takes for him to see Louis again. He wants to lean across the desk, examine the screen, ask the nurse is she sure, is she certain, is she _sure_ it’s him? Is she _sure_ she can do this? 

“Okay,” she says, after a moment that seems to stretch on forever. Harry lets out a breath. “I’ll show you to his ward now, if you’re ready. Or—” She pauses, glances him briefly up and down. He wonders what she must make of him, worn out and weary as he is, now lit up nonetheless by brand new nervous energy. He feels strung tight, poised on his toes, desperate to move. “—you could come back in the morning, if you’d like to get some rest.” 

“No.” The word comes out sharper than he means it to, and Harry stutters to amend it. “I mean, now’s fine. It’s, uh, a long drive — can I stay?” 

The nurse raises one neat brow a touch higher than the other, but she doesn’t argue. “Alright,” she says again, and steps out from behind the desk. “Follow me, then.” 

-

Louis is asleep when Harry reaches his room. In a way it’s a relief; it gives Harry a few minutes to wrap his head around Louis even being there at all. 

He doesn’t look quite like his picture anymore, nor the picture of him from Harry’s memory, the one he’s been carrying with him for the past seven years. He doesn’t look like the man from the music shop, either. Now that Harry has Louis in front of him, he wonders whether there was really much resemblance there at all. Maybe he’d just wanted it so badly, missed Louis so much, he’d invented things where there were none. 

Not that it matters, now. Louis is here. And he just looks like _Louis,_ paler and a little thinner than the last time Harry saw him, but Louis, nonetheless. 

At the sight of him Harry’s heart swells so much he feels like it’s going to burst out of him. It feels so big in his chest that it hurts, and it takes him over from the inside, like a tide rising till he feels like he’s drowning when all he’s doing is standing there, looking. He hasn’t even made it to Louis’ bedside chair. This feeling is so big he can hardly breathe for it; it’s filling every space in him, leaving no room for air, no room for thought. Just this feeling. 

Dizzy with it, Harry sways a little, and just manages to lower himself into the chair. 

His vision blurs; that feeling wells up and overflows out of him and runs down his cheeks, salty and hot and ceaseless. He clasps a hand over his mouth to muffle his sob because he doesn’t want to wake Louis with it. It would be awful if he woke up to Harry crying over him like a baby. And he’d be doing terribly at his job. 

Blessedly, Louis sleeps through it. In fact he sleeps through the whole night, barely stirring but to breathe, and Harry’s watched plenty of donors sleep in that same way, sedation-heavy, but there’s something unsettling about seeing Louis like this. Maybe because he knows what he looks like sleeping naturally, and this is so different. Nevertheless — he can’t look away. 

- 

Eventually he drifts off too, and dozes for a couple of hours at a time until the early morning. A nurse stops by to check Louis’ vitals and offers Harry tea; she speaks at a normal volume, but with Louis sleeping there her voice seems abrasively loud, and Harry has to resist the urge to shush her. 

The next time Harry wakes up there’s a cup of tea on the bedside cabinet that’s long since gone cold, and the ward is warm with mid-morning sunlight, almost blinding in the all-white room.

And Louis is awake, sitting up and looking at him with tired eyes and this curious little smile, and Harry’s heart stops for a second. 

“Morning,” Louis says, as if this is any other day. There’s a dry rasp in his voice that’s miserably familiar, from the endotracheal intubation during surgery; usually Harry would have a pocketful of Fisherman’s Friend for the first few days after a donation, to help soothe it. 

“Hey you,” Harry says back, his own voice thick around the lump in his throat that he can’t seem to choke down. “’S been a while.” 

For a minute neither of them says a thing. They just look at each other, Harry fighting the urge to cry again and wondering whether Louis feels what he feels. Whether he wants to cry too, whether he can sense the coiled-spring tension between them too, whether that’s just in Harry’s own head.

Louis looks so pale and so beautiful and somehow, even though he’s right there, so far away. Harry wants to reach for him more than he’s ever wanted anything. 

As it happens, Louis reaches for him. It’s slow and hesitant, the outstretching of his hand towards Harry’s. Harry holds his breath as Louis’ fingertip touches the silver chain around his wrist. 

“You still have this,” he murmurs, tracing the curve of the little anchor, the bird, the slightly sharper edge of the broken loop. There’s a note of incredulity in his words, and a hint of something like relief. 

His skin where it touches Harry’s is cold, and every wavering moment of contact feels like electricity dancing across the back of his hand. Harry sits as perfectly statue still as he can, scared of somehow shattering this moment. 

“Of course I do,” he says, barely above a whisper. He feels Louis’ eyes flick up to his face, but keeps his own on their hands. “You gave it to me.” 

There’s a pause. “Could you — look in the cupboard for me?” 

Harry looks up, quirks his brow slightly but obliges. He can’t reach with one hand and misses Louis’ skin on his the second it’s gone. On the top shelf in the bedside cupboard, on top of a battered paperback, is a thin length of blue cord with a small silver charm. Harry picks it up slowly, and for a second his vision blurs. “The other bird.” 

“Would you?” 

When Harry looks back to him Louis has his hand raised slightly in asking. Harry gently loops the cord around his wrist and ties it carefully. The blue of it nearly matches the delicate veins he can see through the fine white of Louis’ skin.

Part of him wants to ask, but he doesn’t. He’s pretty sure he already knows the answer, and if he’s wrong, he doesn’t want to be corrected.

Another moment passes quietly, Harry sitting still and watching as Louis resumes following the lines of his bracelet with just the very tip of one finger, like he’s fascinated by it. It’s painful, but he endures it for as long as he can stand until he finds words leaving his mouth without quite meaning to let them. 

“Lou,” he says, softly, and Louis’ movement stills. His gaze on Harry’s face is tangible. “Your hands are cold.” 

He listens to Louis’ intake of breath, quick and then slower; the sound of him catching himself. When he answers, though, his voice is almost steady. 

“Warm them up, then. You’re my carer, aren’t you? Isn’t that your job?” 

At last Harry looks up at him, and is captured immediately by his eyes. There’s uncertainty there, the barest trace of childish nervousness showing through the mask he’s wearing; he looks almost challenging, urging Harry to make a move he can’t quite dare to make himself. Or maybe Harry’s imagining it, projecting, seeing what he wants to see.

So he asks himself, either way, what have I got to lose? and the answer, of course, is Louis. Only Louis. But the thing is he’s going to lose Louis anyway, sooner or later. He’ll have a month or so more to recover from this donation and then he’ll be called in for the next and that’ll be the rest of his life, until he completes. And already he looks so pale. He looks so fragile. 

He’s going to lose Louis. The only say he has in the matter is how to love him until then. Alone, in his head, like he has been for the past twenty-five years. Or out loud, if Louis will let him, with everything he has. 

Their lives are so short. He’s wasted so much time already, he realises, being uncertain. He can’t waste more being shy. 

He takes Louis’ hand in both of his own, cups his cold fingers between his palms. Louis’ hand trembles slightly as Harry lifts it close to his face and exhales a warm breath into his skin, then rubs with his thumb; he mightn’t have time to be shy, but he can be gentle. 

“That better?” 

“A bit.”

Harry presses his closed mouth to Louis’ knuckles, one by one, and feels him shudder. 

“How about now?” 

“Yeah.” Louis’ voice is breathless. “That’s better.” 

-

“Your hair’s so long,” Louis says, quite suddenly. Neither of them has said anything for a while but it’s a pleasant quiet; they’re sharing the music on the radio, Louis drifting in and out of sleep, Harry once or twice doing the same. Now with his free hand Harry touches his hair, suddenly self-conscious; he has it loose and it reaches his shoulders, now. It’s never crossed his mind to get it cut. 

Louis smiles at the look on Harry’s face. “I like it,” he says, and gives Harry’s hand the gentlest squeeze. It seems a little back to front, Louis lying in his hospital bed and reassuring him — it’s supposed to be the other way round. “It suits you.”  

“Thanks.” Harry manages a laugh, and leaves his own hair alone to reach across and ruffle Louis’, lightly. “I think yours is exactly the same as the last time I saw you.”

-

When Louis is recovered enough, Harry bundles him into the passenger seat of his car and drives to the beach. The journey is quiet; Louis, wrapped in a blanket at Harry’s insistence, spends the whole way leaning against the window, watching as the town gives way to countryside the farther out they get. 

He doesn’t want to take him to the pier — as lovely as it is there, it’s always busy, and what he really wants is for them to be alone. Really alone, without the background hum of Kingswood, or of the town, or anyone else. 

-

“I was friends with this girl, Laura, back at the Cottages. And she told me — there’s this thing, for Hailsham students.” 

When Harry glances at him sidelong, Louis is frowning in the direction of the sea. 

“A chance for deferral for — couples. Who are really in love. If you can prove it you can get more time, a few years together before starting donations. Or, well, carrying on. I mean, I don’t know if it’s true, I never heard about it at school, but maybe—” 

Louis is frowning at him now, brows drawn, mouth open slightly. But more than just concerned, he looks frightened; he’s hiding it but it’s there, in the wideness of his eyes. For a moment Harry can’t fathom why, but then it hits him, and the realisation hurts a little: Louis doesn’t know he means him. 

“I thought,” Harry presses on, holding Louis’ gaze. “I thought we could apply. Together.” 

“Together?” Louis stares at him. Such intensity is in his eyes all of a sudden, like his whole world is riding on Harry’s answer. “You’re— with me—?”

Harry laughs, soft and rueful. “Of course I am,” he says, and as the words leave him warmth floods his face; he drops his gaze as his nerve breaks. “Always have been, Lou.”

“What about Carrie?”

There’s a nearly frantic edge to Louis’ voice, a strain in his voice like he’s on the edge of something and fighting to keep his balance. Harry shrugs without looking up, tracing a line in the sand with a fingertip.

“That was _years_ ago. Everyone else had a girlfriend — you had Ella. I was — jealous, I s’pose, that’s all.” 

“Oh, Harry.” Harry lifts his eyes to find Louis’ scanning rapidly across his face, reading every word written there, so Harry does his best to make it easy for him; make himself an open book. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I was such an idiot.” 

It’s Louis who bridges the space between them, this time. He kisses Harry softly, closed-mouthed, and the moment their lips meet Harry feels a tension ebb from him that he hadn’t realised he was carrying, all this time. It only lasts a second before Louis pulls back and looks at him, round-eyed and pink-cheeked. Nervous, Harry realises with a jolt. He’s _nervous,_ and the idea almost makes him want to laugh because he himself is so far from it. In that kiss all his nerves melted away, all his doubts, all his reservations.  

“You’ve always—?” Louis sounds breathless. Harry reaches to touch his face, push back his hair, cup his jaw, and Louis’ hand covers his in an instant and clings. It’s anchoring, and a good thing that is too, because he’s feeling so light it’s a wonder he’s still on the ground at all. 

“I’ve loved you all my life, Lou.”

Again Louis kisses him, and now it lasts long enough to gather heat and hunger; Louis sucks at his lip, licks his tongue behind his teeth, grips Harry’s wrist so tight it starts to hurt, digs in his nails at the back of his neck. It’s all Harry can do to keep up. It feels like drowning, like being devoured, but Harry gives himself up to it, gladly. 

Until he breaks them apart because he realises, suddenly, that Louis is shaking with something more than nerves or passion.

“Louis,” Harry pushes him back gently, holding his face so he can look at him. Apart from two spots of pink high on his cheeks Louis is white as a sheet, brow sheened with cold sweat, and though he’s breathing hard the air doesn’t seem to be reaching his lungs; it catches before it can make it, wheezes painfully. Harry’s own chest goes tight. “Louis—”

“Don’t.” Louis’ voice rasps in his throat. His eyes are damp, too, desperate. A bead of blood runs from his nose, spills over his pale mouth. Harry blots it gently with the cuff of his jumper and Louis stifles a noise that isn’t allowed to be a sob. 

“Come on,” he says. It’s a fight to keep his voice steady, but he does, for Louis. “Let’s get you back.” 

- 

It’s a few days before Harry mentions deferral again, mostly because Louis spends the better part of them in intermittent, exhausted sleep. Often he wakes up with a bleeding nose and ragged breath, and Harry tries and fails not to blame himself. He’s supposed to be Louis’ carer. He’s supposed to make him _better._  

Eventually, though, that’s what makes him bring it up. The slow but sure realisation that Louis isn’t getting much better. The fact he doesn’t want to face, but has to: that they’re running out of time. If they don’t try now, they might never —

Because he doesn’t want this to be all they get. Now they have each other again he doesn’t want all their time together to be spent with Louis slowly fading away in a hospital bed. The life a deferral would afford them might not be long, but at least it would be a life. At least it would be more than this.

He’s just after reading aloud to Louis from one of his old paperbacks when he asks. It’s a tad harder to hold the thing and turn the pages with one hand, the other being occupied in Louis’, but he doesn’t mind. He reaches the end of the chapter and flips the book face-down to save their place. Louis is watching him, looking tired but more alert than he has in the past couple of days. His thumb drifts slowly over the palm of Harry’s hand. 

“I was thinking, Lou,” he says. “About deferral. I was thinking we should go soon, to apply.” 

“Harry,” Louis interrupts him. He sounds so weary, voice soft, like a sigh.

“No, listen, Louis, I know you’re not well, just now, but we should go soon, I was thinking, because maybe it’s this, being here, that’s keeping you not well. And even if it’s not, I’m— I’m just a bit worried, Lou, that they won’t wait for you to get better properly before your next— and you might not— you might—” he swallows a little convulsively. “So we should go soon, alright? In the next day or two, if you can manage it.”

“Harry, it doesn’t exist.” 

Louis’ voice is gentle. Harry looks at him sharply. “What?”

“Deferral, Harry, it doesn’t— it’s made up. I don’t know who started it, but it’s not real. It’s a rumour. Something people tell themselves to feel a bit better, that’s all.”

“No.” He’s starting to panic a little, now. Dizziness rising up in him, making the room shift slightly, making his mouth too dry, making his heart too loud. 

“Harry, love, think about it. You keep saying we need to go, but where?” 

“I don’t—”  

“Harry.” 

“But you—”

“Harry.” 

“We could just leave, then. Why don’t we just leave, Lou? Just get in the car, and—” 

 _“Harry_. Listen to me.” Louis presses his hand firmly, and with the other nudges Harry under the chin, trying to bring back his focus. “It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway. My next donation is scheduled for Monday.”

Harry chokes on the sob that’s suddenly trying to force its way out of his throat. He doesn’t understand how Louis can look so calm when all it’s all _he_ can do not to scream. Not to pull him from the hospital bed and run away with him right now.

“I suppose want to get what they can from me, because I— y’know. But even if we could, Harry. Even if it was real. Look at me.”

He has both hands on Harry’s face, now. Harry looks at him, because he’s Louis and he asked, because he’d do anything for him. As he looks, blood runs in a stark line from his nose to his lip, and neither of them moves to wipe it away. Harry’s breath comes in gulps, Louis’ with a quiet rasp. He knows what Louis is telling him. He just doesn’t want to hear it. _He’s supposed to make him better._

“Now is all we’ve got, Harry. So just— be with me now, okay? Just be with me now.”  

- 

Louis sleeps a little more after that, his hand cradled in Harry’s, fingers curled around Harry’s thumb, and Harry feels like he’ll die if he can’t pull Louis properly into his arms, so he climbs into the narrow bed with him. He tries to take comfort in the rise and fall of his breath where his hand rests on his chest, tries to ignore the way it stutters and hitches every couple of minutes. But he’s resolved to be calm when he wakes up, for Louis’ sake. To be better for him. To do his job. It’s never been more important than it has now, after all. 

-

“I was thinking,” he says again, when Louis lets him know he’s awake by turning his head and kissing him softly under the chin. Harry slips his hand just inside the neck of Louis’ hospital gown to run his fingertip ever so lightly over the scarring line that runs down the centre of his chest, and feels him shiver. “I was thinking. We all end up in different places anyway. Different bits of us in different people all over the country. Right? So, maybe parts of us are missing —”

“Parts of me,” Louis interrupts, voice quiet and croaky. “Not you.”

“I— alright, not me yet. But, look.” He laces their fingers together and lifts them up for Louis to see. “I was thinking, about what you said. About now being all we have. And how for now — look. My hands are still here with your hands.” 

“So?”

“So…” Harry hesitates. “So maybe that’s all that matters.”

A moment passes. Louis brings their hands to his mouth and kisses the back of Harry’s thumb. He can feel his pulse in his palm and it’s right then that he realises it’s true. It really is all that matters.

“I love you,” Louis says. It’s so soft Harry thinks he might’ve imagined it, but he realises he doesn’t mind that much if he did. He presses his mouth to Louis’ temple. Outside the sun is setting slowly; its light filters in through the blinds and bathes them in warm orange-gold.

“I’ve loved you all my life, Lou. Now I’m going to love you all of yours.” 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, comments mean the world.


End file.
